Oh, the things they told us.

• Author: RUNDLES, JEFF

When I was in third grade, 1960 became 1961 right in the middle of the year. I remember clearly, because we had a wonderful student teacher that year (an African-American, in the school year before they admitted African-American students to my school) who showed us that if you turned 1961 upside-down, it was still 1961. I was amazed.

The same teacher also told us that we would all soon be converting to something called the metric system, and I believed her. We studied our little brains out learning centimeters, millimeters, kilometers, liters and all the rest, and we all got very good at conversion formulas.

We learned how tall we were (1.219 meters for me, give or take), and how much we weighed (29.48 kilograms). We were told that by the late 1960s or 1970 at the latest, the U.S. system of weights and measures -- pounds, gallons, feet, etc. -- would be a thing of the past. Those measures wouldn't be taught anymore, they were outdated, and Europe and the rest of the world never used them. We would all be metric.

Oh, the things they told us.

Not long after that, in 1964, my older sister went to the New York World's Fair, and found out that all the telephones would be picture phones by 1970, and that all cars would levitate and travel through the air by 1990. This wasn't science fiction, but verifiable scientific fact. They told us.

We were told that there would be hundreds of televisions stations, all with exclusive programming to meet any and all of our needs and wants, and that we could watch whatever we wanted whenever we wanted. They told us that robots and mind-boggling machines would do all the heavy lifting and grunt work. They told us there would be peace on earth.

Oh, the things they told us.

...